The Reaston/Kay Effect – The Reaston/Kay Effect
The Reaston/Kay Effect – The Reaston/Kay Effect
by Aidan Roberts
Acid jazz. So thrilling, so inaccessible. The devil’s music, as some scholars have put it, is an art-form not easily done well – so often a jazz combo will come together to create a cacophonous rattle of squeaks and rumbles, with little to reel the listener in. But this Sydney combo consisting of Martin Kay (alto sax), David Reaston (guitar), Brendan Clarke (double bass) and Dave Goodman (drums) have laid down a record of midnight-y potency, and it’s rather good. This is a collection of tracks laced with all the colours of the genre – such as the racy, traffic-horn jive of Location, the pure insanity of Grounding, and perhaps the most pertinently titled Brew, which owes not a little of its heady textures to a certain Miles Davis prog-jazz classic. This is quality experimental jazz, exhausting and multi-layered. Reaston’s buzzing and atonal guitar playing is a signature sound that offsets well with Kay’s screaming alto sax rambles. This is a heady brew, biatches.
***1/2
